“The chairman of the State Conservative Committee said he expects the party to pull its endorsement of State Senator Stephen Saland (R-Poughkeepsie) for his vote in support of gay marriage in New York … “The Conservative Party has to be true to its principles and those principles are supporting marriage between a man and a woman and we can no longer endorse people who don’t respect that or honor that commitment,” [Mike Long] said …”

Putting aside the issue, this statement is laughable. The last thing Mike Long or the CP does is stand on principle as is evidenced by the people their party has endorsed over the years (remember Rick Lazio?) They don’t support the RKBA and I cannot recall them ever trying to hold their endorsed officials accountable on it. They give lip service to cutting taxes, but don’t follow up at election time when giving out endorsements. They make some noise about abortion, but generally don’t follow up with that at election time either. They only thing they’ve been pretty consistent on is dumping on homosexuals. While I don’t doubt that is in fact an issue for them, what Long & Co. are really bent out of shape about is the fact that Saland and a few other Republicans decided to give them a very public middle finger. For that reason alone Saland deserves a round of applause.

Washington Whispers reports on NRA President David Keene’s goal to knock off Obama next year:

“… “Our major goal is to defeat Obama because if he’s re-elected, he’s going to attempt to change the Supreme Court. All he needs is one vote and he will rewrite the Second Amendment,” says Keene …”

While this is certainly true, it is equally true that an antigun Republican could do the same thing. By announcing their intentions this early in the campaign season, they’re essentially acknowledging that any Republican including antigun Mitt Romney will be acceptable to them even if they have terrible public records on the issue. Any leverage NRA had in a possible GOP primary is now gone as is any they had for influencing the V.P. pick. This was seriously stupid of Keane to open his mouth.

We continued to make small, positive advances in Albany. The only gun control bill to come up was microstamping A-1157A and it took much arm twisting to get 77 Yea votes, the slimmest majority for any antigun bill I can recall over the past 20 years. Big game rifle hunting bills for several counties passed giving us some minor victories. If we continue at the same pace next year, and have good turnout at lobby day, next year may be the first year in who knows how long that no gun control bills come up.

It appears that Dean Skelos is going to get booted as Senate Majority Leader before the legislature goes into recess. His likely replacement is Tom Libous. From a RKBA standpoint, Libous is much more pro-gun than Skelos so this should not affect microstamping and other legislation.

“… One of McCarthy’s big issues has been gun safety. Scaturro believes in the constitutional right to bear arms and that people have the right to have something for their self defense. He understands though that the general public doesn’t need machine guns that could cause a lot of damage and is sensitive to gun safety after having been robbed at gunpoint recently …”

I don’t know if this comes from direct quote from his campaign or just the editor writing their interpretation of his position, but this statement is pure BS.

Historically, McCarthy’s opponents have been cannon fodder who didn’t put much effort into their campaigns. On guns, they were either as bad as McCarthy herself or nearly so and all did their best to avoid the issue. This makes sense to a degree as McCarthy is a single issue candidate and owns the antigun position. Now with Scaturro himself being a victim of violent crime I don’t see how he can avoid dealing with the RKBA directly. He’s either going to have to publicly come out 100% gun rights or 100% gun bigot.

The state legislature is still in session arguing over gay “marriage”, rent control and property taxes. Guns aren’t on the posted agenda, but this is the time when they often try to sneak stuff through.

It is my understanding that the NYS Health Department has hired 2-3 people to process the backlog of records checks for pistol license applicants. I don’t have a number, but it has to be in the thousands of applications going back to at least March.

The legislature is scheduled to go into recess on Monday, but may go long. We need calls to the Senate on both the microstamping bill S-675A and a domestic violence bill S-4244C which contains some very bad language which could affect gun owners involved in such cases as it specifically allows determinations to be made based on hearsay.